I have to vent here for a minute about a SERIOUS hole in the already terrible privacy controls over at Facebook that I don’t think most people are even aware of.

As you know, Facebook has added a new feature; the “ticker”. It’s that small, ever scrolling bar in the upper right hand corner of your newsfeed that shows you what your friends are currently up to: what they’re listening to, playing, and most importantly - what they’re clicking like and commenting on. Why is that the most important thing? Because that’s where that little ticker is SCREWING YOU OVER.

I’m careful with my privacy. I use my Facebook page to share photos of my kids with my friends and family, but I don’t want those pictures accessible to people I don’t know. I’m protective of them. I’m also not a big fan of the “lurking” and “stalking” that seems to have become so socially okay in the last 5 years or so. I don’t want my exes watching my every move, scouring through photos of me with my fiance, or out on the beach on vacation. I don’t want my fiance’s exes to have access to pictures of me or my kids either. I’ll be blunt - not all of either of our exes are super stable people in general. I don’t want my exes’ new women to be all up in my shizz either. You’re getting my drift here, right - I like my privacy. I value it and I do kind of a lot to protect it. Which is why I had it locked up like Fort Knox. A stranger would see my Facebook profile, my public page, as nothing but a cover shot for my timeline, my current profile picture, and my hometown. That’s it. Nothing is set to be shown to the public, and more relevantly to this conversation, none of it is set to be shown to “Friends of Friends”.

I have a lot of reasons for this. One of which is that I’m friends with some people from work, but very purposefully not my boss. My boss is friends with them though, so that won’t work. Also, I have friends that are mutual friends with some of my exes, including recent exes as well as my ex-husband. I don’t want to share with them either. So everything is firmly set to “Friends Only”.

Turns out, though, that Facebook gave you that option, but it’s a total damn farce. Complete fabrication. 

That little ticker I mentioned? Let me walk you through an example:

I post a photo of me and my fiance on a sunny day. Yay, isn’t it cute! My Gramma clicks like, my friend Michelle comments “Awwww”. Everyone’s happy. Until my friend Sarah clicks like on it. Sarah is friends with Tom, my ex boyfriend. Because they’re friends, when Sarah clicks like it shows up on Tom’s ticker. Tom’s ticker tells him “Sarah liked Joon’s photo.” Tom clicks on this, and he can see a full version of my photo, my comment/description, who I tagged, anything I’ve listed about where/when it was taken, and all of the likes and comments it’s received thus far. 

Despite the fact I’ve set that photo to Friends Only, and Tom is not on my friends list, Tom has access to my photo. Anytime Sarah, or any of our mutual friends, is active on any of my posts, Tom has access to them. 

I’m sorry, Facebook, but that’s MESSED. UP. 

So what are my options? My privacy settings are obviously useless. Here’s what you can do:

You can protect your friends from this happening to them by going to each and every one of their pages individually, and unsubscribing from their feed. Of course, this also makes it so you can’t see any of their activity in your newsfeed, and will only know if they post something if you manually go to their timeline. Super convenient, right? I for one have about 90 friends, and have friends whose lists number in the several hundreds. It’s just not possible.

To protect yourself? There’s nothing you can do but ask your friends to do to you what I’ve described above: Ask them to go to your page, and unsubscribe from your feed. Of course, this makes the whole premise of Facebook totally pointless. Now I’ll be posting photos and status messages but no one will see them unless they manually go to my timeline. That’s asinine. 

No, this is a terribly easy fix for Facebook to make, but an almost hopeless one for us. My options are to stop posting altogether, only post things I am okay with having be at least semi-public, unfriend everyone that is friends with my exes or my boss, or move to an entirely different social network (which sounds better and better by the minute) with a better, more controllable privacy policy, like Google+.

Shame on you, Facebook. I hope this lawsuit nails your ass to the wall. It was bad enough when you were raiding my emails and contacts without my permission to make your ads more customized to me, but this is a total slap in the face. To pretend that I have options, and then disregard my choices, is reckless at best and dangerous at worst. Boooo. And the fact that you’ve known about this problem for over 6 months and don’t even seem to see it as a problem (let alone have it on the radar to alter this in anyway) is irresponsible. Shaaaaame.

K, that was more than a minute. BUT IT WAS IMPORTANT.